Free Gods of Mischief by George Rowe

ripped the patch off his back anyway. But at least the man kept his dignity.

    Big Todd Brown.
    Oh, and Big Todd walked out of the Toy Box with that transmission part he coveted . . . free of charge.
    As for Bro’s chickenshit brothers, a handful opted to join the Hemet Vagos—including North and Doc, the dentist who’d bought my Harley shovelhead, and the only two chapter members olderthan I was at the time, an ex-con named Sparks and another the Vagos christened Buckshot.
    Road names, bestowed by the club when a prospect reached patched status, were sometimes real head-scratchers, but that wasn’t the case with Sparks and Buckshot. Sparks got his name simply because he was a certified electrician. And Buckshot—well, Buckshot had barely escaped the business end of a shotgun down in Mexico. His brand-new Harley, on the other hand, hadn’t been so lucky.
    In addition to those turncoats, Big Roy had scraped together a handful of other recruits for his chapter, including Ready, who worked as a tattoo artist at the Lady Luck, Jack Fite, a notoriously violent human being, and Jimbo, a muscle-bound juicer who supplied the Vagos with anabolic steroids. I never touched that shit myself. I’d heard too many horror stories about shriveled dicks and wooden balls.
    And then there was Crash.
    If ever there was an appropriate road name for a motorcycle outlaw, Crash was it. That big bastard crashed his stock Harley just about anywhere and any way humanly possible. And because we came into the club around the same time, I found myself traveling many nervous miles beside that spun fool, worrying whether he would dump his bike and take me down with him. With the exception of my mother, I think that crazy Vago gave me more migraines than any other human being on the planet.

    Crash, my fellow prospect and one crazy-ass sonofabitch.
    First time I laid eyes on Crash he was standing outside the Lady Luck wearing a skintight tank top and a green bandana, eyeballing me over his ratty moustache like hewas king shit. I had no idea where that dude had come from, but prison would have been the obvious choice. The man had that behind-the-walls mentality, a way of talking and behaving that was hard to define but easy to recognize when you’d hung around that type as long as I had.
    Crash had fathered a crew of kids with a woman so skinny she’d almost disappear when she turned sideways. Wasn’t long before I discovered he had another love in his life: crystal meth. Methamphetamine has been the one percenters’ drug of choice for many years now; its use is so prevalent that in the summer of 2001 the feds pulled the trigger on Operation Silent Thunder, sweeping up a large meth ring in the California High Desert that included several Vagos.
    From the late sixties into the seventies, “Reds” were the outlaw world’s preferred drug. Sold in red capsules under the brand name Seconal, the pharmaceutical was prescribed as a sedative. But that drug was anything but sedating for the bikers who abused it. Reds amped a man up and made him fearless enough to commit murder, which was not uncommon in that particularly violent era. For their own survival, outlaw clubs began banning the use of Reds. After a brief fling with PCP, they hitched their wagon to methamphetamine. Man, outlaws just loved their crank. Gave them that little extra giddy-up they needed to keep riding and partying straight through ’til morning.
    In Crash’s case, meth just made his incredibly inept riding even worse. The man would continue to be a terror in the saddle for as long as I knew him, but when I first hung with the Vagos, the bigger concern was the chapter’s sergeant at arms. Right out of the gate, North was telling Big Roy I couldn’t be trusted—that I just might be a snitch.
    As true as that might have been, there wasn’t a chance in hell that fuck could have known what I was up to. That closely